Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said Thursday that his company has about 200 employees and expects this number would double this year.

It usually means a management team that's gone into empire building mode, and lost touch with reality. Some companies survive that kind of rapid influx of employees, but most don't. The style of management has to change dramatically - you need to move from ad-hoc, go with the flow style to having actual procedures and processes.

Nothing I've seen from Twitter tells me that they have the capability to do that :)

Pity AT&T and their troubled data network. While previous iPhones' data usage was largely confined to static webpages, simple apps and maybe the occasional song streamed through Pandora, the just-announced iPhone 4's (available June 24) hunger can best be described in one word: video. In other words: If you thought the iPhone was a data-hog before, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

There's going to be an obvious disconnect between what you can do on the phone (stream HD from Netflix), and what AT&T is prepared to allow you to do. If Verizon didn't have motivation to get LTE rolled out before, they sure do now.

Obviously this represents a new chapter in the life of Dabble DB, both for us as a team, and for the product itself. We’d like to assure you that, for now, we will continue to provide our software and technical support to current Dabble DB customers. However, we will be disabling new account signups effective immediately.

What the disablement means is that Twitter doesn't care about DabbleDB as a business; they bought technology and staff. However, that's where I get skeptical. DabbleDB is built on Squeak/Seaside, while Twitter is built on Ruby and Scala (apparently less Rails than it used to be). I have a hard time seeing the Twitter folks adopting Squeak; the typical pattern in these acquisitions is something like this:

Those guys have great technology; let's buy it

Their tech isn't built the same as ours; we'll take the ideas and rewrite it

.... years pass

... original technology dies, completely new project that is less based on the acquisition than you might like to think appears

From the link above, it's clear that the purchase was all about the Trendly analytics stuff - which makes any future for DabbleDB itself even more murky, IMHO. This is obviously a nice exit for the DabbleDB folks, and that's great for them.

Ad analytics collection is prohibited unless it is "provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads," Apple's revised terms read. "For example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent."

It's not entirely clear how broad that ends up being, but it sure tilts the playing field Apple's way. While I'm not a huge fan of government anti-trust actions, I have to wonder how smart this action is for Apple, given the fact that the DOJ is already sniffing around. Also, given how much further the Europeans were willing to go with Microsoft, it hardly ends with the DOJ.

Yorke has now issued a warning to upcoming artists, urging them not to sign traditional record deals because they would be tying themselves to "the sinking ship."

I'm not sure whether his timeframe is right, but heck - he's in a better position to know than I am. Even if he's off in his timing, I think he's right in the broad sense. There's really no place for the labels any longer. They serve as a middleman in a market that has been disintermediating for years now.

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at using the ThreePaneSelectors tool for browsing senders/implementors. You should certainly look at Searchlight, which is a more up to date take on this functionality. You can watch it on YouTube right now, or follow this link to the video.

They have no idea who wrote the web framework they use. They've never met the guy. They could care less about why he designed it one way or another. It doesn't matter because once the programmer was done he wasn't useful. Following his life is pointless because he's poured his life into the software and now they get to keep it. You've stolen his soul like an old sepia tone photo of a Cherokee warrior.

Welcome to reality, dude. Do you know who the designer of your car was? Who designed the LCD screen you watch? I seriously doubt it. Should programmers get more attention? Maybe, but the reality is, outside of the the arts, sports, and politics, there are very, very few "stars" out there. Even in business - beyond Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, only the technorati know who the "tech business stars" are.

Most people labor in obscurity. It's always been that way, and it likely always will be. Put another way: get over yourself.

I'm giving Safari 5 a shot as my default browser, and I have to say, the new "reader" functionality is interesting. IT's also going to infuriate a lot of media people. Consider a typical article in the NYTImes, without using reader (but note the icon in the address field):

And now consider the page in the reader view:

Ads and graphics gone, crisp, clear text left to read. I like it - but I suspect that website that rely heavily on ads won't. Still -it's nothing that couldn't be done with client side Javascript added via something like Greasemonkey.

This is a written companion piece to this morning's screencast - I'm going to cover how to add a custom tab to the browser. The example I'm using is simple - every class understands the method #printHierarchy, which gives you a textual hierarchy diagram. At one time, that was a view possibility in the browser (circa 5i). Today, we'll add that back in a tab. To start, create a new package:

With that package created, we need a UI for the tab. It's a simple one, with a text widget filling the canvas. Using the UIPainter, create something like this:

Once that's created, install it as a subclass of Refactory.Browser.CodeTool. Select the "other" drop down option in the install tool and enter that in:

With that installed, we need to write some code - in this case, three instance side methods:

isActive
^self classOrNameSpace notNil

#isActive is sent to determine whether or not the tab should be visible. In this example, it should only be there if a class or namespace is selected. You an examine the methods in class CodeTool to see what's easily possible. Next, the tab needs a name:

tabName
^'Print Hierarchy'

Finally, something needs to actually happen when the tab is selected; we'll add a #postBuildWith: method to fill our text widget with the text for the "diagram"

Today must be the day for piles of stupid. I see that the RIAA expects Limewire to cough up - wait for it - $1.5T $150B

Now it looks as though one Kelly M. Klaus (right) of Munger, Tolles & Olson, yet another RIAA posse, wants Wood to order LimeWire owner Mark Gorton to pay $1,500,000,000,000 [ed: $150B] for 200,000,000 alleged downloads, at $750 per.

Where does a dumb figure like $750 per song come from? never mind the obvious - most trading of music doesn't cost anyone money, because the people engaged in large amounts of file sharing weren't going to pay under any circumstances. The rest (the vast majority) who grab a handful of songs probably end up buying more after figuring out whether they like an artist or not.

But never mind all that - the going price for songs on the net ranges from $0.79 - $1.29. Where the heck does $750 come from? I'm afraid it comes from somewhere the sun never shines...

But by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company (NYT) declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.” In an unusual coincidence, the Times Web site was on prominent display on a huge screenshot of the iPad during Jobs’s speech.

It's hard to begin to criticize this, because there's so much stupid. First, the Times chose to make their RSS feeds available. Second, it's easily possible to configure access to an endoint based on the inbound request source - sure, that can be scammed, but most people don't know that. The bigger issue is the first one though - the Times made these feeds available, so it's not possible for an app that reads them to be infringing. It's sort of like putting a huge rolling sign with headlines in your window, and then yelling at any passerby who has the temerity to pause to read it.

The lawyer for the Times has a pretty stupid take on it:

“The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.”

If that's true, then Safari needs to be yanked, since it can see RSS feeds as well. As does the Atom browser, and any other RSS reader in the app store - and when I searched just now, there were pages of them. When will the Times and this moron of a lawyer go after those, and Safari?

This is interesting to me - the short video lectures on a wide range of subjects that Salman Khan has put together. On a very narrow topic (Cincom Smalltalk), I've been doing something similar since 2006 - short videos to cover a small topic area. The contrast between typical education and this approach is stark:

Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model—often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia.

It takes a motivated person to learn via self paced instruction, but I wonder - how much do unmotivated people learn in a University setting? A lot of the people I went to school with spent much of their time partying - they could have done that on their own dime, instead on mom and dad, or a student loan. Maybe it's time to really examine how useful the standard lecture approach to education is.

BarCamps are blowing up the traditional conference; maybe it's time something blew up the traditional school the same way...

It doesn't really matter that Android supports Flash, or whether Android based tablets do - Apple's major market share in the mobile space is driving change. Here's one developer's story, about why they are ditching Flash for their site:

Why? Because many of our employees and customers use iPhones. As it stood, the several Flash components on our home page either showed up as blank spaces on iPhones, or didn't provide the content we really wanted to deliver. We also anticipated a time when customers, the media, industry analysts and others would be viewing our pages on iPads -- perhaps even more so than on iPhones. In other words, we had to future-proof our site by removing Flash.

This is why I'm happy that I moved away from Wink (which uses Flash to drive the final screencast) back in 2008 - I managed to accidentally future-proof "Smalltalk Daily".

This is a decision I expect to see more of. Having two or more video formats is just too expensive (in terms of time, if not money). It's simpler to just drop out something that's HTML5 ready, like H.264.

JNIPort is a Smalltalk library which allows Java code to be invoked from Smalltalk. It acts as a bridge between the world of Smalltalk objects and a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) where Java code is executing.

That makes the (huge) set of Java libraries accessible to Smalltalk developers. It looks like cross dialect Smalltalk works is expanding nicely.

Yellow Pages Group Co. said last week that it would no longer deliver residential phone books in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa-Gatineau, Montreal and Quebec City, except to customers who request them. A Yellow Pages spokesperson said Winnipeg could soon join that list.

Every year the residential listings go straight from my driveway into the recycling bin. I can't remember the last time I looked up a non-business number in a printed phone book...

It seems that the outage isn't simple - there's a hardware problem on our server, probably the hard drive. I'm working with the IT group at Cincom to get that resolved, but it's going to take a bit - if the HD needs replacing, we'll have to do that and restore from our backups. I'll keep you posted on our progress, but in the meantime, you can still access all of our media, if not in quite as organized a fashion as we have in the archives.

Find out why Seaside is driving a new generation of developers to pick up a powerful and productive language called Smalltalk. Long a secret weapon in the finance, manufacturing, and transportation sectors, Smalltalk is now being used by more and more businesses to develop complex applications faster and more cheaply than their competition. Shared Nothing, REST, HTML templates: these all have their place. But leave your conventional wisdom at the door and see if you can't discover a better way to develop your next online application

I've been playing Mass Effect 2
for a few days now - it took me a bit to get used to the changed interface from Mass Effect. The game is much bigger than the initial game, and mostly better. I really only have a few complaints:

The new planet scanning thing. Adds nothing to the game, it takes a fair amount of time, and you can't really avoid it. That should be streamlined

The whole running out of fuel thing is realism at the expense of game play. Chuck it; It's like narrating a sound sleep in a book.

That makes me sound more down on the game than I am. It's very immersive - much more so than the first game. That's part of why the annoying aspects are so annoying - they take time away from an otherwise enjoyable game. I hope BioWare cleans those two things up for the third iteration.

This week's podcast features our Product Manager, Arden Thomas. This is part 2 of two; if you didn't listen to part 1, you might want to grab that episode first. In this podcast, Arden discusses three things with us:

We didn't discuss WebVelocity 1.1, since we covered that on a recent podcast. Arden is anxious to hear what your needs are in Cincom Smalltalk - if you like what you hear this week (and next; this is part 1 of a 2 part podcast), let him know. And if you think there's something else we should be doing - let him know about that, too!

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

To listen immediately, use the player below:

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

The characters in this book are mostly good, although "Martha" from the immediate future ends up being a little stiff. The main character, Matt, is better drawn, but is mostly along for the ride. I found the first half of the book to be very compelling, but - as with the H.G. Wells
story with which is shares an awful lot, how things got to be the way they are whenever Matt lands is never explained. Maybe it's my love of alternate history, but I really wanted to know how the throwback Massachusetts (a primitive religious culture guarded by obnoxious AIs) got to be the way it is. Never mind though; it's off to the next stop.

The rest of the book tied things up too tightly, I thought. The more or less magical beings who work with Matt to get him to somewhere better just don't make a lot of sense, and by the end of the story, I felt like I did at the end of The Stand
- a great opening had been rushed to a conclusion, with a fair amount of stuff in the middle that we didn't really need. I liked the book, but I can't give it a ringing endorsement. If you like Haldeman, you'll like the book. Otherwise, it's a quick read, but not a great one.

The mercy rule (if a team is winning by "too much", the game is just called as a victory for them) makes some sense in youth sports - sometimes one team is just so clearly overmatched that it's painful to watch more. But this?

In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default.

That's just stupid. In sports, it's easy to let your guard drop and be suddenly surprised. Trying to artificially keep games close is bad for all parties involved. The team getting beaten knows that they are being let off easy, and the winning team will end up being filled with rage that their victory has been stolen from them. I can hardly think of a more counter-productive move in sports.

I hadn't thought of Apple's mobile space this way, but mp3newswire has an interesting set of numbers:

In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units.

As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild.

Now, combine that with the announced iAd platform, and you have a new media empire rising - and it's one for which Apple doesn't have to share the revenues as much as the networks had to...

You have to love the sheer cluelessness of this Apple demo site - they are trying to show off how Safari supports standards such as HTML5, which is fair. But, if you try a different browser, you get this:

It would be a lot more effective if you could use the site to compare and contrast with Safari. Found via this Guardian story.

Safari Reader: Click on the new Reader icon to view articles on the web in a single, clutter free page

Most sites have a header, footer, sidebars, and, with ads, all manner of annoying tactics to get your attention. If this catches on, it could do for typical web advertising what the web did to classifieds...

David Buck tells us that the Ottawa STUG will be talking about debugging in June:

Smalltalkers user the debugger all the time to see what a program is doing and to help familiarize themselves with new parts of the system. Most developers, however aren't familiar with some of the more advanced features of the debugger. In this talk, David will present some of the more obscure areas of the debugger including various options for stepping, breakpoints, one shot breakpoints, watchpoints, variable watches, class watches and more.

For example, if you download one episode of Mad Men (47min 41sec) from iTunes you’ll be using up 554MB for the standard video and a whopping 1.51GB for the episode in HD. That’s practically your whole data allotment.

AT&T has been explaining that the "average" iPhone user uses way less than 2GB of data per month, but: the iPhone is not the iPad. The iPad is a much better device for consuming video, and the usage patterns for it will differ from those of the iPhone.

If AT&T sticks to this plan, Apple will end up paying for it in very, very unhappy customers. Since Apple really, really doesn't like that, I expect this policy to change.

Looks like Apple is about to have real competition in the music - Google:

At Google I/O a few weeks ago, Google teased the audience with a glimpse of a web-based iTunes competitor that would be a new section of the Android Market. Details were sparse during that time, but we may have found the name of the service through a new logo that is hosted on Google’s domain: Google Music [ed: The url for that graphic 404's now].

Apple's going to have to get with the program - no more tethered only synching for iPads, Touches, and iPhones. Or, they can get left behind...

Apple is riding high on their iPad sales right now, but I think Jason Snell is on to something. While showing off his iPad to a (non-techie) colleague, he ran into this:

The other day I was talking to a colleague, a bright guy who obviously works in the technology and media industries, but isn’t on the technical side. He’s what I’d call a moderately informed tech consumer, and I was showing him my new iPad. His response to me was shocking: He said that he had been interested in buying an iPad, but needed to read PDF files, and since Apple only supported its own formats, he couldn’t buy one.

Now of course, you can view PDF files on an iPad, and, load video and audio that didn't come from Apple. but - notice the assumptions. Apple is building up a reputation as a walled garden outfit. If that meme spreads, then their hardware sales will suffer.

Apple needs to open up the iPad and iphone enough to kill that growing meme - or the fall from grace they experienced during the rise of DOS and Windows will happen again.

While I like the XBox, I was annoyed by this - I went off to exercise earlier (stationary bike), and took the XBox upstairs with me. I don't have the wifi adaptor for the XBox, and there's no wire in that room, but I figured that shouldn't be a problem - I fired up Mass Effect 2
.

Wrong

It requires a connection. No problem - I grabbed my Macbook, set up internet sharing, and hooked the wire up. Easy, right? Well.... no. It didn't work. I didn't have all day, so I just went back and played another game, but I Googled later, and came up with this:

Start Internet Sharing

Edit /etc/bootpd.plist as root: change reply_threshold_seconds to 0

Reboot. Yes, you really do have to reboot. Don't start/stop Internet Sharing before rebooting because it will revert your change on you

Erf. Next time I give things a go, I'll try that. I've never had an issue sharing a connection from the Mac, either to other Macs or Windows PCs, so I'm kind of puzzled by this one...

Giorgio Galante has released the contents of the email he sent to AT&T's CEO, along with the audio for the awesomely stupid response he got back. A company with a clue would have had something resembling a response by now, but I guess that's not AT&T.

Looks like they did recognize how bad this looked. Engadget reports that ATT has apologized to Galante:

Giorgio tells us that he's received a sincere apology from an AT&T senior VP, who took responsibility for the mixup. Apparently the cease and desist warning came about due to bad reading of AT&T internal policy -- Giorgio was told the rep who made the call is "not having the best of days today" -- and AT&T tells us it's reviewing its procedures to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Still - I wonder how awesome the next chat between Jobs and Stephenson will be?

With the rationales being offered by AT&T (and various consultants) for the changes to their data plans, I'm reminded of Vizzini's constant cry in "The Princess Bride":

But industry analysts said that when customers take “unlimited” literally, those plans rapidly become money losers for the companies — and lead to network congestion.

Gosh, how dare those pesky customers - taking the words the vendor used to describe the service seriously! Next thing you know, those pesky customers will also expect honest bills and polite service. The horror.